Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

“Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“-Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself-and be lenient to everybody else.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Now comes the mystery! (last words)”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.

— Henry Ward Beecher

“I pray on the principle that wine knocks the cork out of a bottle. There is an inward fermentation, and there must be a vent.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“A cunning man overreaches no one half as much as himself.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or the cart.

— Henry Ward Beecher

“I have great hope of a wicked man, slender hope of a mean one. A wicked man may be converted and become a prominent saint. A mean man ought to be converted six or seven times, one right after the other, to give him a fair start and put him on an equality with a bold, wicked man.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“People of too much sentiment are like fountains, whose overflow keeps a disagreeable puddle about them.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Nothing dies so hard, or rallies so often as intolerance.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“A man's ledger does not tell what he is, or what he is worth. Count what is in man, not what is on him, if you would know what he is worth-whether rich or poor.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

I think you might dispense with half your doctors if you would only consult Dr. Sun more.

— Henry Ward Beecher

An oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful bwefore all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute? The exterior is not persuasive.

— Henry Ward Beecher

“If you want your neighbor to know what Christ will do for him, let the neighbor see what Christ has done for you.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“If we would have anything of benefit, we must earn it, and earning it become shrewd, inventive, ingenious, active, enterprising.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Nature would be scarcely worth a puff of the empty wind if it were not that all Nature is but a temple, of which God is the brightness and the glory.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The mystery of history is an insoluble problem.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“When our children die, we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear. We know that they go out from us, and we stand, and pity, and wonder.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

We know much of a writer by his style. An open and imperious disposition is shown in short sentences, direct and energetic. A secretive and proud mind is cold and obscure in style. An affectionate and imaginative nature pours out luxuriantly, and blossoms all over with ornament.

— Henry Ward Beecher

The monkey is an organized sarcasm upon the human race.

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The one great poem of New England is her Sunday.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The strength of a man consists in finding out the way God is going, and going that way.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Each book has a secret history of ways and means.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

Riches without law are more dangerous than is poverty without law

— Henry Ward Beecher

Christ is risen! There is life, therefore, after death! His resurrection is the symbol and pledge of universal resurrection!

— Henry Ward Beecher

“To love I must have something I can put my arms around.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Every man carries a menagerie in himself; and, by stirring him up all around, you will find every sort of animal represented there.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

Flowers may beckon todwards us, but they speak todward heaven and God.

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Love is the world's river of life”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Mirthfulness is in the mind, and you cannot get it out. It is the blessed spirit that God has set in the mind to dust it, to enliven its dark places, and to drive asceticism, like a foul fiend, out at the back door. It is just as good, in its place, as conscience or veneration. Praying can no more be made a substitute for smiling than smiling can for praying.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Some men will not shave on Sunday, and yet they spend all the week in shaving their fellow-men; and many folks think it very wicked to black their boots on Sunday morning, yet they do not hesitate to black their neighbor's reputation on week-days.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

It is a very good world for the purposes for which it was built; and that is all anything is good for.

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Nothing can be further apart than true humility and servility.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Customs represent the experience of mankind.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The world is to be cleaned by somebody, and you are not called of God if you are ashamed to scrub.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Heaven answers with us the same purpose that the tuning-fork does with musicians. Our affections, the whole orchestra of them, are apt to get below the concert-pitch; and we take heaven to tune our hearts by.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Earthly love is a brief and penurious stream, which only flows in spring, with a long summer drought. The change from a burning desert, treeless, springless, drear, to green fields and blooming orchards in June, is slight in comparison with that from the desert of this world's affection to the garden of God, where there is perpetual, tropical luxuriance of blessed love.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The rarest feeling that ever lights a human face is the contentment of a loving soul.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“We only see in a lifetime a dozen faces marked with the peace of a contented spirit.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up in the air.

— Henry Ward Beecher